academics

There's nothing like the discovery of an unknown work by a great thinker to set the intellectual community atwitter and cause academics to dart about like those things one sees when looking at a drop of water under a microscope.

It was a time when a degree was expected but not much respected.

PISA was developed by a kind of think tank for the developed world, called the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, and the scientist at the center of the experiment was Andreas Schleicher.

Through most of human history, our ancestors had children shortly after puberty, just as the members of all nonhuman species do to this day. Whether we like the idea or not, our young ancestors must have been capable of providing for their offspring, defending their families from predators, cooperating with others, and in most other respects functioning fully as adults. If they couldn't function as adults, their young could not have survived, which would have meant the swift demise of the human race. The fact that we're still here suggests that most young people are probably far more capable than we think they are. Somewhere along the line, we lost sight of _ and buried _ the potential of our teens.

Education is not merely meant for you to write and pass exams, get a good job and a good spouse, and settle down for survival.

Make your education valuable. Apply what you learnt. Refuse to take the back seat and watch things happen. Join the change and be part of the change.

Knowledge was scattered treasure, education organized it into art, commerce and science.

Life is not only about acquiring knowledge, it is about applying knowledge.

This is not education my friend. It is a process of manufacturing computation devices that look like Homo sapiens, and thereby falsely labeled as Education.

Academics tend to have wonderfully infantile senses of humor.

I have never compromised on academics and the one thing that I insist on is good grades, even though I am a relaxed and indulgent parent in most other things.

Fortunately, our colleges and universities are fully cognizant of the problems I have been delineating and take concerted action to address them. Curricula are designed to give coherence to the educational experience and to challenge students to develop a strong degree of moral awareness. Professors, deeply involved with the enterprise of undergraduate instruction, are committed to their students' intellectual growth and insist on maintaining the highest standards of academic rigor. Career services keep themselves informed about the broad range of postgraduate options and make a point of steering students away from conventional choices. A policy of noncooperation with U.S. News has taken hold, depriving the magazine of the data requisite to calculate its rankings. Rather than squandering money on luxurious amenities and exorbitant administrative salaries, schools have rededicated themselves to their core missions of teaching and the liberal arts. I'm kidding, of course.

It__ the remarkable thing about academics: they look at Shakespeare and always see their own faces in him.

They were really willing to pay to avoid any trouble. No doubt they had overestimated the ability of academics to make a nuisance of themselves. It had been years since an academic title gained you access to major media.... Even if all the university professors in France had risen up in protest, almost nobody would have noticed, but apparently they hadn't found that out in Saudi Arabia. They still believed, deep down, in the power of the intellectual elite. It was almost touching.

Academics place much more importance on rigorous logic. There is also admiration in the profession for subtle reasoning. And mastery of the craft shows itself in the elegance of the intellectual super-structure_. The practitioner, on the other hand, uses economic theory only to the extent that he finds it useful in comprehending the problem at hand, so that practical courses of action will emerge which can be evaluated not merely in narrow economic cost-benefit terms, but by taking into account a wider range of considerations_. A practitioner is not judged by the rigour of his logic or by the elegance of his presentation. He is judged by results.

I had good intentions once upon a time. Well, September.

Education makes your maths better, not necessarily your manners.

... I succeeded at math, at least by the usual evaluation criteria: grades. Yet while I might have earned top marks in geometry and algebra, I was merely following memorized rules, plugging in numbers and dutifully crunching out answers by rote, with no real grasp of the significance of what I was doing or its usefulness in solving real-world problems. Worse, I knew the depth of my own ignorance, and I lived in fear that my lack of comprehension would be discovered and I would be exposed as an academic fraud -- psychologists call this "imposter syndrome".